[fedora-java] Headaches for sysadmins which Java apps/services

[Joshua Daniel Franklin]

Continuing discussion from
"Re: Web-Interface for packages in Fedora: repoview, repowatch, something else?"
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-July/msg01093.html

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Ven 20 juillet 2007 15:26, Jesse Keating a écrit :
>  > All I'm doing is stating my opinions that I've developed over the
>  > years of dealing with java applications and hosting java services.
>
> IMHO as soon as we get a working FLOSS JDK the various Red Hat/JBoss
> Java groups need to do get together a few days with Red Hat/Fedora
> distro/Infrastructure team representatives and hash up how Fedora/Red
> Hat Java can be made sysadmin-friendly.

As a sysadmin who deals with Java apps and services, off the top of my
head I'd say the biggest headaches are:

--installing JDKs, which should go away with a Free IcedTea JPackage in Fedora
--process and memory monitoring (which "java" process is 3109 again?)
--runtime dependency resolution (building a /usr/share/java/ CLASSPATH
vs devs bundling all their own jars)
--custom startup scripts for local apps (tomcat has an OK init script)
--duplication of effort between ant/maven build files and RPM spec files
--authorization/authentication (tomcat realms vs unix groups, etc.)
--system-config-securitylevel / iptables for RMI or java.net.*
--on dev machines, updating eclipse (though we just started using the
Jpackage'd
RHEL4 SDK channel which seems pretty stable)

Fedora can't do anything about some of these, but providing a JDK once the
IcedTea issues are resolved will be a big help. And that's waiting on Sun:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.distro-packaging.devel/57
Note: classpath.org is currently down, use http://iced-tea.org/ instead.
If anyone has a lot of cycles, wouldn't it be great if ant's <rpm>
task generated
a spec with dependencies as well as built the RPMs? :)

Thanks,
Joshua